I wondered why someone would want to make a movie about a barely-was has-been, hooked on heroin, mad at the world, as she tries to rebuild a flimsy career in unlicensed Eastern European venues. The last 15 minutes, the film started to click, Nico’s voice sounded better, and I sort of appreciated the punkness of the director’s efforts and, if nothing else, the acting showcase it provided Trine Dyrholm. Not every painting is beautiful, nor is every life.
An early frontrunner for Worst Film of the Year: cliched acting, flat directing, a void of a plot (“Lisa’s Bad Day” was the sum and substance of the story), visually uninteresting setting, and generally unappealing characters. There was not a single one of the disjointed scenes that connected with me or didn’t make me wish I were watching TV instead. Some audience members laughed uproariously – at what? – and all three papers we read gave it a good review, so there is no accounting for taste. I kept waiting for something to connect; it never did.
Kudos to Spike Lee, who masterfully tells a story and envelops it in a personal statement about racism in America, past and present. Adam Driver has never been better, and there are fun roles for Steve Buscemi’s younger brother, Harry Belafonte and the goofy guy from I,Tonya. There’s a prologue and an epilogue that, strictly speaking, don’t belong in the movie about Ron Stallworth, but they add gravitas, and current relevance, to a story that might otherwise be hard to take seriously. When I read a piece in the next day’s Times about a Midwestern audience watching the new Dinesh D’Souza movie, I felt I was back in Colorado Springs.
Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t shocked, or even surprised, that 45 years ago someone engineered a study of twins separated at birth, or that an adoption agency wouldn’t tell the adoptive parents about the twins, or that one of the reunited triplets would eventually go his own way and have emotional issues, or maybe it’s just that I didn’t enjoy spending time with this particular group of people. For whatever reason, despite its constantly noted self-importance, the film left me cold. What most struck me, in fact, was the media’s obsession with the story of the triplets, how they piled on, one after the other. And it’s hard to imagine so much being made of this today; were the early ’80s just simpler times?
Excruciating and exquisite at the same time, this movie walks a fine line beautifully: we see Kayla Day at her most unattractive, yet we like her all the same. She has enough acne to be real, but not so much that we look away. And if anybody doesn’t identify with at least one scene, if not many, they have surely forgotten what it was like to be 14. Josh Hamilton’s Dad is a bouncy counterpoint, keeping things light; and the movie’s use of social media is so today, just perfect. I don’t think I’m the target audience for this film, but I loved it.
I say 3/8 because I only last 45 minutes. When a plot is so formulaic, not to say stupid, you count on enjoyable performances to keep you interested. Unfortunately, the all-star cast was as flat and unconvincing as the plot. Sandra Bullock is a fine actress, but a compulsively criminal mastermind she is not. Cate Blanchett is rarely my favorite, and her shaggy hairdo, a la Jennifer Lawrence in Red Sparrow, did not a character make. Little spark anywhere, lot of absurdity everywhere.
The King tells a story of America over the last 60 years using the life of Elvis Presley as its metaphor. From an era of innocence and authenticity and world-shaking change, we progress, or regress, to bloated stagnation with money the only goal, from Tupelo to Las Vegas. But director Eugene Jarecki doesn’t preach; he lays out a visual and musical buffet from which the viewer can pick and choose and to which, I suspect, one could return for seconds. I have been a diehard Elvis fan since 1955, so the shots of him performing “Don’t Be Cruel” and talking with his eyes twinkling would have almost been enough for me. The social commentary by Elvis scholars and critics added a second, provocative layer. Another thread was the musical vignettes, with performers, often obscure to me, singing in the backseat of Elvis’s 1963 Rolls-Royce. Without any announcement, they covered the spectrum of music that colored America around Elvis: the blues, country, Americana, rock, surf, gospel, torch, even early hip-hop. The car itself was a character: it helped tell the story as it drove from Tupelo to Memphis to Nashville to New York to Hollywood to Vegas. Jarecki, too, appeared on camera, never obtrusive but enough to offer us a way into the picture. There were talking heads who didn’t have obvious connections to Elvis or music – Alec Baldwin, Mike Meyers, Van Jones, Ethan Hawke – but again expanded the movie’s horizon beyond specialists. In the background, archival clips reminded us of what else was going on: Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, juxtaposed with flashes of Donald Trump and the 2016 election. When Elvis, in a final performance, lets loose on “Unchained Melody,” we don’t know whether to believe there is still power and life in the mess we’ve made, or whether this is the last extravagant bloom for a hemorrhaging society.
This could be viewed as a film about the PTSD of Vietnam veterans, a father-daughter relationship or social communities, but I admired it most for the coming-of-age performance by Thomasin McKenzie, a wonderfully ingenuous New Zealand actress. She seemed to grow up as she moved from the forest to living with others, even while her father couldn’t change. After reading the brilliant novel, “Yellow Birds,” I wasn’t surprised by the father’s inability to cope with society, but it still seemed rather a stretch to believe he could survive and raise his daughter on a diet of foraged mushrooms. But as I’ve said, concerns about the plot – and I had many – took a back seat to the pleasure of watching Tom.
Whether you think “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was warm and fuzzy or vapid and cloying will determine your reaction to this movie, which faithfully recounted the career of Fred Rogers and his unique view of television. Regardless of your view, and I lean toward the latter camp, the film does make one wonder if kids are inherently attracted to pie-throwing and violence; or if not, has children’s television had such an influence? Of course, we should all agree that more portrayals of niceness and goodness would be beneficial, but I’d rather they come with the art and intelligence of Sesame Street.
This will win the award for darkest film of the year (I hope). Ethan Hawke was riveting, although I wish he had had a bit more presence to begin with. He never seemed to fill his pastoral robes, so didn’t convince me of what he used to have been. We came upon him already subject to doubts and well into the bottle. Was that really a Neil Young song they sang at the eco-terrorist’s funeral? – it was. Would he really have known how to detonate a suicide vest? – we’ll never know. Like a polluted river, the movie split into four or five conceivable endings as it reached the delta, but that’s not where we were supposed to focus.
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.